Or rather, her portrait, which was hanging on the far wall of the room. Slowly, I wandered over toward the living-room area lined with bookshelves. There were other photographs. The closer I came, the more I understood what, until now, had been a mystery. Fifteen photographs sketched out a retrospective of the parallel life that Francis and Annabelle had shared for years. They had been all around the world together. I recognized iconic places: the Sahara Desert, Vienna shrouded in snow, a tram in Lisbon, the roaring Gullfoss waterfall in Iceland, the cypresses of the Tuscan countryside, Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland, New York before the fall of the Twin Towers.

More than the places, it was the smiles, the serenity on their faces, that gave me goose bumps. My mother and Francis had been in love. For decades, they had shared an idyllic, illicit love affair, a long-term relationship that no one suspected.

But why? Why had they not simply made their relationship official?

Deep down, I knew the answer. It was complicated and owed much to their remarkable personalities. Both Annabelle and Francis were tough, no-nonsense individuals who would have found it comforting to build a world that was theirs alone. They had always carved out their lives against the world, against the mediocrity, against the hell that was other people and from which they longed to be free. Beauty and the Beast. Two extraordinary people who scorned respectability, propriety, marriage.

I became aware that I was crying. Probably because in the photographs, my mother was smiling, and because I had rediscovered the person I had known as a child, the woman whose gentleness would sometimes appear from beneath the icy mask of the Austrian. I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t dreamed it. This other woman existed—the proof was right there before my eyes.

I wiped away my tears, but still they flowed. I found this double life, this unique love story, profoundly moving. Surely, at heart, true love paid no heed to convention. Francis and my mother had experienced that purity, that chemistry, while I had merely dreamed it or experienced it vicariously in novels.

One last picture caught my eye. It was a small sepia print, a class photo taken on a village square. It was inscribed in pen: Montaldicio, October 12, 1954. In it were three rows of children, about ten years old, all of them with raven-black hair except for one little girl standing off to the side who had blond hair and pale eyes. All the children were looking straight at the lens except for one little boy with a chubby, expressionless face. As the photographer clicked the shutter, Francis only had eyes for the Austrian. The prettiest girl in the school. Their story was foretold in this photo. Everything had started here, when they were children, in the little Italian village where they had grown up.

4.